Winslow homer biography art director
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The stern look on the father's face as he steers the small boat is contrasted by the youthful postures of the his sons, lost in their own thoughts, not quite attuned to the pressures of the adult's world. The simplicity of the local lifestyle appealed to his interest and gave him a new selection of genre scenes loosely related to his increasing interest in marine scenes.
Over a decade later, Homer traveled to Cullercoats, England where he was impressed by the lives of those men and women whose livelihood depended upon the sea.
Shortly after establishing his studio in the city, Homer enrolled in classes at the National Academy of Design in the fall of that same year. By the time this image was taken, he had covered the Civil War, traveled to Europe, and opened his own studio." width="203" height="300">
In 1867, Homer traveled with his painting to France for the first of his two trips to Europe, and lived in Paris for nearly a year.
Many of his works—depictions of children at play and in school, of farm girls attending to their work, hunters and their prey—have become classic images of nineteenth-century American life. In place of the urban and industrial, the viewer is captivated by the eternal cycles of the natural world. None of this prevented Homer's contemporaries from seeing such works as unvarnished and in some ways disagreeable truth.
The style of his work, even in this early period, irritated critics of his day, some of whom described it as "unfinished," and has long frustrated anyone seeking to create a lineage between Homer and earlier masters in either the United States or Europe.
"You will see, in the future I will live by my watercolors," Homer once remarked, and he was almost right.
Less obvious to modern viewers, are the changes in the technology and warfare shown in this engraving which was later the basis of an oil painting by the artist. Instead of caricatures, he depicts quiet moments in the everyday lives of the newly freed African-Americans.
The Homer sesquicentennial (he was born in 1836 and died in 1910) is being celebrated with "Winslow Homer Watercolors," organized by Helen Cooper at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Her catalogue is a landmark in Homer studies. However, the sharp diagonal created by the fox, matched by the artist's signature in the lower left corner, suggests a sense of motion for the animal and allows the viewer to determine the conclusion to this dramatic scene.
This simple painting, which appears so quintessentially American in tone demonstrates the influence of his brief stay in France in the previous decade.
His work figured importantly in developing an American artistic sensibility at a time when European influences were the topic of much debate by artists and critics in the United States. Homer bought the carriage house of the main house which belonged to his brother, where he built his artist studio with a view looking beyond the rocky cliffs to the sea.
He regularly approached subjects overlooked by professional artists of his time - rural schoolchildren, hunting scenes, or the lives of recently emancipated African-Americans - with a passion to tell a story.
Winslow Homer was a painter of the first kind.
Works such as these offered an anchor to an American public during a period where the effects of rapid industrialization provoked great economic change and social anxiety. If you want to see Thoreau's America turning into Teddy Roosevelt's, Homer the watercolorist is the man to consult.